8th
Visit From the Future: Apple’s New TV
I can’t resist. I have to let it out of the bag. Future Me showed up last night and told Present Me all about the new rumored, Apple television.
Thinking about all the pundits’ speculation about everything it can’t be and won’t be, it’s amazing that everyone is overlooking the signs. The SIGNS.
When speculation over the iPhone was buzzing for years prior to its 2007 announcement, people projected their wildest dreams on it. Staying to plan, Apple took technologies already available, combined them in a clever way, and spun it into iPhone gold.
For their “integrated television set,” they will do the same thing.
The guts of the existing AppleTV can easily be hidden inside even the slimmest flat panel sets today. But the new thing won’t resemble the existing AppleTV platform in any recognizable way.
The new integrated Apple Television—I’ll call it iTV here because everyone else does—will be, from the outside, a beautiful TV set with a very narrow black bezel. (Later it will come in aluminum and white). It will have a power cord.
The key will be the user interface. It will support cable TV. It will support small dish antennas. It will accept over-the-air signals. It will support online providers like Netflix or Hulu.
The new iTV interface is intelligent, but not magical. It will intelligently scan all of your available providers—whatever they are—and provides you a single, integrated experience to search, play and review all content.
Using the power of technology, you can choose from anything that you have access to. Live, time shifted, whatever. You don’t even need to pre-record something you want to watch later. Basically, it’s like you recorded everything on TV last night, and can watch any of that content once it aired. If you had the ability to watch it because you have a subscription to it, you can watch it at your leisure. From all providers, all in one integrated user interface.
But here’s where it gets magical.
There are no wires.
It will have only one input.
And that input is to connect to your home network for broadband over Wi-Fi. That’s it.
If we learned one thing from the music deals that Apple has managed to finagle the past few years it’s this: philosophically, content owners—the people with the copyrights—don’t mind you doing what you will with their content if you’ve actually paid for it. Really, truly, paid real currency for their stuff. And if you do, they have generally agreed you already have the legal right to listen/view/record it in the venue of your choice.
The new iTV—or more accurately the platform behind iTV—serves all the content for all users. Apple sells you a television which includes access to that platform.
You don’t know or care about where the signal comes from really. It just gets delivered seamlessly to your iTV.
How does it work? The new iTV will have an easy-to-use set-up interface. You just give it your street address—and it will know which over-the-air-channels you should receive based on your location. It knows which cable company you have—and you just need to tell it which package you pay for, which it can confirm. You let iTV know you have DirecTV service, for example, and it gives you access to exactly the same content you would if you have that dish connected to a regular TV the usual way.
Except, you don’t need the dish. Or the cable box. Or over-the-air rabbit ears.
It’s like you told your morning newspaper delivery guy not to deliver the physical paper anymore, because you get those bits elsewhere. You bought the paper, but you don’t need the paper part of it. Get it?
You save money because you stop renting cable boxes from your providers. You just pay them a subscription fee for access to the content, which you already do. Oh, and did I mention that later, Apple will also become a provider—essentially a virtual cable company—and have competitive deals with individual subscribers based on their location? This way, Apple can also earn ad revenue based on geography. Or, based on your Genius settings, deliver the advertising holy grail—commercials targeted directly at you.
This is the future of iAds. The sickly version on iOS 4 was just an opening salvo.
It’s a winning combination that builds on the content deals Apple already negotiates and existing case law in the cable industry dealing with subscription assets and distribution.
This is the smart idea Steve Jobs was talking about. And it will change the way we watch TV and how we buy our content forever. Goodbye multiple inputs. Hello one plug for power, and a wi-fi connection.
The future cable company won’t be a provider of infrastructure: it will be a contracts broker helping you create a bespoke cable channel platform of your very own. Apple will provide this service to you, or in the spirit of fair competition, you’ll eventually be able to tell who your contracts broker is, and the TV will use that alternate platform. The war of unbundling cable channels will become moot through these deals. (Did I mention they’ll be an ugly nine-year multi-party lawsuit over this contracts stuff that gets resolved at the U.S. Supreme Court? Yeah, that too.)
One problem. Future Me grabbed a slice of pizza and dashed before I could ask when this would happen. All I heard as he ran into the distance was “September….” I couldn’t make out the year.
Apparently Future Me is a faster runner than Present Me. Time to get on the treadmill.
